Chapter Nineteen #2
Just when I think it can’t feel any better—like this is good, but not orgasm good—Adrian hooks a finger inside me.
My head falls back and a moan rips out of my chest. I dig my hands into his hair as he keeps moving, alternating short and shallow with long, devastating strokes that draw tingles across my skin.
I’m teetering on the edge of a cliff, about to rip apart at the seams. Adrian keeps pumping his finger and tongue—shit, that tongue—holding me right on the edge, like he’s found every single one of my lines and he knows exactly how to keep me on his side of ecstasy.
My knees curl against him. Gasps escape between my pants.
I haven’t breathed this hard since the last time I was on the erg.
Adrian’s other hand travels higher, hitching my hips into his mouth. My head falls back, spine arching. My gasps turn to moans even as my body blooms with heat and vibration.
I’m close—so close—and Adrian knows it because his finger glides faster now, tongue rolling and swirling in escalating rhythm.
I’m cresting like a wave, force and pressure building up in the arch of my back.
He adds a second digit. I contract around him—a sudden and completely involuntary seizing that leaves me shaking.
Adrian doesn’t back down. It’s like he can sense this crack, this splinter, and he’s wresting me fully open.
His rhythm intensifies, fingers picking up their pace, and tongue moving still faster. I clench again and almost twist away, but his arm around my back tightens, keeping me pressed close. And there’s so much pleasure and vibration and movement and rhythm and—
The wave crashes.
Everything explodes. Lightning bursts in my mind, splitting apart in raining shards of glass.
My vision spots and blurs even as pleasure racks through me in glittering confetti.
My fingers pull at Adrian’s hair but he keeps moving until I shudder, then murmur out a sigh. Only then does he let me go.
I’m panting and Jell-O and so utterly wrung out that I think my insides might be made of nothing but fizzing bubbles.
Adrian runs his nose across the skin of my thigh and I can feel his smile. “Worth all the sanitizing I’ll need to do tomorrow?”
My brain is still making its way back from somewhere around the ceiling, so for a long moment I’m not even sure I know my name, let alone what needs to be sanitized.
I struggle up to a real seat and Adrian releases my legs. I’m so lightheaded that I nearly lose my balance. He catches me with an arm around my torso.
“I said I wouldn’t let you fall,” he tells me as I slump against his wide frame. “So maybe it’s time for that bed, after all.”
And even though I’m still boneless and wrung out, his words send another lick of heat up my middle. I pull back so I can look him in the eye. “The bed?”
Adrian smiles and kisses me softly. “For sleeping,” he says. “For resting.”
“But…you.”
“Kath.” His fingers flutter against the edge of my face, drawing down to my chin. He kisses the divot of skin between the swell of my cheek and the ridge of my nose. “I’m fine.”
“But,” I say again. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. These aren’t the steps.
Adrian’s tongue skims against his bottom lip and, even though it’s his arms and his torso that are holding me upright, he gives me a look that can only be described as vulnerable. Like, suddenly, he’s the one who might break.
“I want to wait for next time.”
Somehow, I understand what he’s leaving unsaid.
He only wants to do that with me if there is a next time.
He’s not ready to give up this piece of himself unless he has some assurance that this first time won’t be our last. I think I know all that because, even as he says those words—next time—I know there might not be one.
Tomorrow, I’ll have to go back to the reality of my life. Training. Pan Ams. Winning back my spot. These are my goals.
Relationships—and all the complex, uncontrollable emotions that come with them—are not compatible with these goals. Worse, my feelings about Adrian are already more intense than they ever were for Maxwell. Today, and what just happened this evening, has made that terrifyingly clear.
I can’t afford to get too invested and end up like my mom—curled on a couch, clutching a paper napkin as I sob. I can’t afford to lose focus. I can’t let myself get distracted and emotional in the weeks before the most important race of my life.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I have the willpower to stay away. I’ve tried that. Multiple times. I only ended up half naked on Adrian’s countertop.
So, I have no idea what I think about “next time.”
“I’m—I’m evaluating you for a job,” I say, because it’s the closest approximation of an excuse that I can give him right now. Besides, it’s true. Unbiased, Carla told me. I’m not sure doing what we just did counts.
Adrian tips his forehead forward until it touches mine. “I’m not going to get that job.”
“You’ve said.”
“So, what’s the problem?”
“You’ve never said that you don’t want it.”
I feel his forehead shake. “It’s the same.”
“It’s not.”
“Okay. How about this: I trust you to keep it all separate.”
“Separate?”
“Separate, like, when I do this”—he drags his thumb down my collarbone—“it has nothing to do with my weight room routines. And when I do this”—he presses his lips to the exposed skin just above my neckline—“you don’t have to think about splits. Are you thinking about splits?”
“No.” The word quivers out of me.
“Good.” I can feel his smile tight against my skin. “Because right now, all I’m thinking about is you.”
Inexplicably, my body aches for him all over again.
“Does that mean we can do bed things?” I ask.
Adrian lifts me into his arms and my hands coil around his neck. He carries me toward the closed bedroom door, as he again says, “Next time.”